Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Sparks Innovation

Author John Steinbeck once said, “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” At Johns Hopkins University, there is no shortage of new ideas, but success requires the right environment to nurture those ideas into the revolutionary products and solutions we depend on to address the world’s most pressing problems. Johns Hopkins University is a unique ecosystem for innovation, and Carey Business School is the right place for business leaders eager to cultivate new ideas.

As America’s first academic research institution, Johns Hopkins University is well known for its monumental achievements in the field of health, which is led by its renowned schools of medicine, public health, and nursing. The entire university, including Carey Business School, forms an ecosystem for research, discovery, and collaboration. The power of this ecosystem was fully apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Poets&Quants suggested in February 2021, Johns Hopkins University was “synonymous with the COVID fight.” In August, Fast Company named a group from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab as 2021’s Innovative Team of the Year in part for collaborating with the university’s Whiting School of Engineering to create the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracking dashboard. This same dashboard was included in TIME magazine’s list of 2020 Best Inventions. 

Johns Hopkins is an inviting environment for inspired entrepreneurs. For the past four decades, Johns Hopkins has led all U.S. universities in research and development spending, which topped a record $2.9 billion in 2019. Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the university’s business incubator, has helped launch more than 170 commercial startups and raised more than $3 billion in venture funding since its founding seven years ago. Several of these ventures emerged from the Carey Business School.

In 2018, a Carey MBA graduate founded Rose Health to develop systems to improve the delivery of mental health care. The Rose Health app—’Rose’ for Recognition of Speech and Emotion—utilizes deep-learning algorithms to detect trends in a patient’s mental health status and helps providers improve the delivery of care. Rose Health increased its revenue by 20 times last year and plans to expand with products for children and adolescents. The software platform received early support from Johns Hopkins University’s Social Innovation Lab and Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Hexcite medical software accelerator. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) recognized Carey Business School’s collaboration with Hexcite as one of 2021’s Innovations That Inspire.

Thrive Earlier Detection, another startup with connections to Johns Hopkins Medicine and Carey Business School, was purchased in October 2020 by Exact Sciences for $2.1 billion. Thrive Earlier Detection developed a blood test that can detect cancers as a part of routine medical care. The testing technology was one of the more than 1,800 innovations available across many disciplines at Johns Hopkins.

The spirit of innovation at Johns Hopkins transcends the business of health, as well as the country’s borders. A current MBA student at Carey is co-founder of ICE Commercial Power, which is working to develop renewable energy for people in Nigeria. This is just one example of a new business venture out of Carey’s innovation ecosystem that aims to address urgent problems related to energy security and climate change. 

At Carey Business School, we’ve worked hard to create an environment and curriculum that is tailor-made for the innovative business leader seeking to solve big problems. In 2020, we reimagined our full-time MBA with more emphasis on analytics and “power skills,” which include leadership, negotiation, team building, communication, and change management. Students can choose from two pathways of study: Health, Technology, and Innovation, or Analytics, Leadership, and Innovation. Required courses in design thinking, artificial intelligence, and analytics prepare students to lead in innovative tech environments, whether within major corporations or in rapidly growing startups.

To provide students with more opportunities for applied learning and interaction with global business leaders, we doubled our experiential learning courses. The Innovation Field Project pairs teams of students with leading companies to address some of the most pressing business challenges. This year, students worked with a diverse array of companies including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Capital One, and Siemens to name a few. MBA students specializing in health, technology, and innovation learn to manage a product’s lifecycle from design to commercialization through the Design Lab and Commercializing Discovery courses. Some of the student’s projects include innovative breakthroughs and discoveries made by Johns Hopkins University researchers. 

At Carey Business School, our motto is “build for what’s next.” While no one can be certain of what is to come, or what challenges our society will face next, it is a certainty that we will need business leaders who are ready to seize opportunities to create lasting value in an ever-changing world. Johns Hopkins Carey Business School is the place for business leaders seeking opportunities to innovate and tackle complex business problems.

Alexander Triantis became dean of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in 2019. An expert in the areas of corporate financial strategy and valuation, Triantis believes a strong business education for the 21st century should be modeled on a three-prong approach that includes interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential learning, and online lifelong learning. Triantis can be reached at carey.dean@jhu.edu.

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.